Scaling Operations: Linking Strategy and Execution

40 ratings

Over the past several decades, operations strategy has played an increasingly important role in business’ success. In this course, we will equip you with concepts and tools to build operations in a way that not only supports your competitive strategy, but also allows you to create new opportunities in the market place.
Scaling operations: Linking strategy and execution is a five-week course dedicated to making strategic decisions that are grounded in operational reality. Together, we will study how to build and evaluate the “operating system” of the firm to maximize value. This involves tailoring the firm’s operational competencies, assets, and processes to a specific business strategy.
Each week, we’ll explore case studies, engage in discussions and examine realistic data. Thanks to our data-driven approach, you’ll be able to implement your learning directly into practice. At the end of this course, you’ll be ready to build an effective, actionable plan to scale your department or organization.

From the lesson

Capabilities and Competition: Defensibility and Trade-offs

Module 1 introduced the capability view of operations as the natural link between competitive strategy and operations. In this module we will investigate this link in greater depth and use the capability view to assess the competitive risk the firm faces. A good operations strategy clearly stipulates which capabilities are critical and which are of secondary importance. One can't have it all: operational capabilities exhibit trade-offs and superior performance requires making choices. But where do these trade-offs come from and how can operations shape them to our competitive advantage? That is the subject of this module. We will outline the main challenge; develop the framework, and the use a simple case to illustrate it.